Fringe Legal #3: Consciousness, Ethics & Criminal Law/ AI Superpowers / Call for Collaborators

Here are three things that were worth sharing this week:

1. Think

Recently, I finished reading Kai-Fu Lee's AI Superpowers. It's a fascinating book looking at how AI will shape the world to come. It helped me understand some of the background to how this globals arms race towards becoming an AI Superpower, the cultural factors driving the US and China in particular, and then connecting some of the questions raised to the world today.

There were two points in particular, I wanted to share today:

In deep learning, there’s no data like more data. The more examples of a given phenomenon a network is exposed to, the more accurately it can pick out patterns and identify things in the real world.

This will not be disputed by anyone, but was hit home as I reviewed a survey that asked Legal IT professionals about their technology priorities for 2021 (excluding security). To my surprise "data analytics" ranked the highest, followed by knowledge management.

Algorithms tuned by an average engineer can outperform those built by the world’s leading experts.

I wonder if this means that we will see a race to build the biggest teams of data analysts, engineers or other specialists within the legal profession? Or, will will continue thinking about the most recent disaster, forgetting that most things don't go wrong twice consecutively.

You can find the book on Amazon (I recommend the Audiobook)

2. Listen

Dr Allan McCay is a PhD in Law, admitted Solicitor, an author and lecturer in Criminal Law at University of Sydney Law School.

This episode certainly gives credence to the name of the podcast - and, in true Fringe style Allan and I take a winding road across a number of big topics. Frankly, many of whom are at the precipice of being researched. This felt like we were discussing a sci-fi future, but one which we may soon be faced with.

A question to ponder as you listen to the episode is: what roles do consciousness based humans play in potential future world dominated by non-conscious machines that can make decisions faster than humans based on algorithms.

Listen to the full episode here

3. COLLABORATE

As you may know the Fringe Legal Podcast is a season show. The third season is coming to an end in a couple of weeks, and we are busy planning for the next season.

We are busy planning the concept for the fourth season. Would like to help direct the theme of the season.

Reply to this email, and we can collaborate.

Until next time. Stay well.

Ab

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